Fast & Easy Way of Creating Hair or Fur Text Effect In Photoshop

In this video training tutorial, I will show you how to create a hair or fur text effect in Photoshop. Although the results are extremely realistic, there is no Photoshop 3D used at all! Only very clever techniques using Layers, and Layer Masks!

The whole project won’t take you more than 20 minutes to complete and it is a very useful technique that you can apply to many other projects, not just the fur text effect.

You can use whatever image of a furry creature that you like to achieve this effect. I will use a picture of my cat but feel free to use any image of hair or fur to complete this Photoshop text effect.

In This Fur Text Effect In Photoshop Tutorial:

02:20 – Add texture to a font.
04:45 – Use a brush to add more detail to text.
05:50 – Create a custom brush.
08:22 – Make a work path from a selection.
08:45 – Stroke a path using custom brush.
12:00 – Add layer styles to create depth.
13:50 – Add hi-lights and shadows to the text.

Photoshop Fur Text Effect – Final Image:

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This one had me going. The stroke path was always grayed out. Every time I selected the path, the layer would deselect. It was unseen, so it took a while to find the problem. What would cause it to do that? Yours didn’t.

Although it’s good to know how to make a custom brush, there is another way(!) … to rotate the brush.
Select the “Dune Grass” or “Grass” brush. Go to the Brush window, and then to Shape Dynamics.
Set the Control of the Angle Jitter to Direction (the bottom one in the drop-down menu).

Note: click and drag the brush (your mouse) clockwise.
(If you go counter clockwise you’ll get the bottom part of the brush on the outside.)
Just play around with it and have fun! 🙂